


Requiem For a Fox

by PAMDirac



Series: Sci-Fi One-Shots [2]
Category: Zootopia (2016)
Genre: AU, Dystopia, Far Future, Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Sacrifice, Science Fiction, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-24
Updated: 2017-08-24
Packaged: 2018-12-19 08:52:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,336
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11894283
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PAMDirac/pseuds/PAMDirac
Summary: Two thousand years after the first interstellar colonisation attempts, the final lost colony is found. What should have been cause for celebration turned into the bloodiest war in history, both sides bent on exterminating the other. The colony of savages revel in the bloodlust and the destruction of their progenitors; the original civilisation fighting purely to survive.This is a one-shot for now that sets ups the world and history for this AU which I'd like to come back to at some point - though that won't be for a while. It doesn't spend a lot of time on the characters and isn't at all your typical fluffy one-shot. You have been warned. I hope it's interesting though.





	Requiem For a Fox

**Author's Note:**

> So fair warning, this is not a happy, fluffy piece. There's what some might consider heroism, some sacrifice, and a few dashes of semi-familiar sci-fi spices. What we have here is a somewhat dystopian far-future in which certain things have gotten more than a little out of control. People die. It's a weird, slightly uncomfortable AU I dreamed up a while back and fleshed out while walking to work the other day. For now, it's a one-shot, though there's room to build on this story - that's the nice thing about sci-fi: there's always so much room to explore.
> 
> I'd love people to read this and let me know what they think, about the universe, the world-building, and the writing. That said, I fully expect the hit count to be low as this is far from your typical Zootopia fare _and_ I've committed the cardinal sin of not including a certain rabbit - at least in any recognisable form. On the flip side though, my last one-shot focused exclusively on Judy so I guess this is payback for the fox fans out there?

Captain Nicholas Piberius Wilde stood proudly on the bridge of the Takara. The great Continental-class warship might be coming apart around him but it seemed as though her innards would hold together long enough to allow her captain to do his final duty with dignity. He snorted bitterly, desperately sad about how few of his crew had managed to make it off the ship, and sadder still to think of how many would be recovered only to be torn apart. _But at least the **fucking** artificial gravity is keeping me _ dignified _._

He would have hit something - hard - but it wouldn't help. Instead he took as calming a breath as he could, noting the cherry-red glow spreading along the forward hull. A lifetime of controlling his emotions was harnessed; he wrestled his guilt, his fear, and his sorrow into submission. This was not the future he'd dreamed of as a kit, but it was the future he found himself in. He closed his eyes and focused on keeping his breathing steady as the demonic glow intensified and the rumbling howl of atmospheric gases dying with his ship grew louder.

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Those kithood dreams; they had been glorious. Some two thousand years ago, great colony starships had been sent out into the galaxy. Hulking, primitive things, lacking technology more sophisticated than the very earliest force fields, twenty of the giant ships had been launched over the course of two decades. Generation ships, their simple fusion systems barely producing enough power to accelerate them to a hair over ninety-eight percent of lightspeed, all had been aimed at stars within three hundred lightyears of Earth. The nineteenth colonised world had been discovered as he was entering adolescence. His dream, a dream turned blackest nightmare, had been to find the last of them.

Fifteen of the colony ships had reached their targets. Inside of a millennium, semi-regular trade had been established, the frontier worlds gradually being reabsorbed into the growing mammalian civilisation. Their technological development had been stalled by the decades their ships had held them in relativistic purgatory - decades that spanned centuries on the old homeworld - followed by the very real centuries it took to establish settlements on new and not always particularly friendly planets. As such, they found themselves primitive backwater cousins to their rapidly advancing brethren. It forced them to innovate in extraordinary ways, many of them gradually developing into something like ancient university towns: intellectual hubs that nurtured creativity and sheltered their residents from the chaotic hustle and bustle of everyday life.

Five of the colony ships had been lost, in total almost a million mammals vanished without a trace into the depths of space. Two had been found eventually, a thousand years after they'd been launched. The Interstellar Republic of Mammals' brand new faster-than-light drive allowing their Navy's scouts to comb vast swathes of the nearby galaxy. Both had developed remarkably well, given the navigational errors that led them to miss their original destinations. The mammals on board had adapted to shipboard life and were content to wait until they chanced upon another life-supporting world before decelerating - the ancient force fields and fusion systems not being up to the strain of decelerating to manoeuvre then accelerate back up to their cruising speed. The crews had been rescued by the navy ships - sleek and powerful, they flew the seven hundred and eighty lightyears back to their original target worlds in a little over two years.

A century later, with FTL systems now capable of reaching speeds of nearly twenty lightyears per day, the third lost ship had been found. A much grimmer find, logs indicated they'd also experienced navigational issues. Radiation-saturated compartments, sensor readings, and some long-range observations told the rest of the story. The full fury of a supernova within a light year had cut through the radiation shielding (consisting of nothing more than enormous slabs of steel and lead) as though it didn't exist. A ship of nearly a quarter of a million cadavers left a bitter taste in many mammals' mouths, their ancestors' impulsiveness and impetuosity distressing. If only they'd have been patient enough to wait for FTL, or for better forcefields.

Then the fourth missing ship had been discovered. The nineteenth colony had been founded on a small world nearly a thousand lightyears away from their target world. Unlike the first three, there had been no navigational errors, simply terrible luck. It seemed that by pure chance their course happened to have brought them within a few hundred million kilometres of pair of merging black holes. The gravitational tug of the dead stars had been enough to fling them off course, the gravity waves from the merger distorting and warping their trajectory still further. Much like the crews of the first two ships, the mammals aboard had decided to wait until they reached an habitable world.

Nick had dreamed of finding the fifth lost ship. The final lost colony. What a discovery that would have been. He joined the navy as soon as he could and a decade and a half later found himself first officer on a scout ship. Eventually he got himself promoted and the dream faded somewhat as he found himself with more responsibility and missions that would never take him as far into the unknown as a scout would see every day.

After a hundred years of faithful service, commanding one of the most intimidating warships ever built by mammals, and with rumours of a promotion to the admiralty beginning to circle, Nicholas Wilde had had his universe torn apart.

The final lost colony ship had been found. But it wasn't a colony of mammals they discovered. It was a terrifying real threat.

Limping back into IRM space, the scout ship Raven had barely had time to send a warning message before contact was lost. They had found an inhabited world orbiting the star known as Alpha Leporis, some thirteen hundred lightyears distant from Earth and had been attacked almost immediately upon arrival.

Just days later the attacks began. Tens of thousands of tiny spacecraft, accompanied by carriers nearly a dozen kilometres long, poured into IRM star systems and began systematic extermination missions. Planetary defences, and eventually naval squadrons, racked up thousands of kills. It did nothing to slow the wave of assaults.

Desperate tactics were tried, stratagems that would never have been considered under other circumstances given credence and opportunity. Eventually they managed to slow the progress of the invaders. Eventually, after an inordinate amount of bloodshed, the IRM navy succeeded in destroying one of the enemy carriers at a world called Liktor. The thousands of craft that remained in-system went mad, targeting anything they could with wild abandon, ramming navy craft in massed waves, obliterating themselves and most of the reeling navy task force.

It had been Nick's plan that led them to down the carrier, his natural guile honed by decades of naval training and service. It had been Nick's dream to find the last colony. It was Nick's nightmare that his victory turned to dust made of his annihilated task force, of the bodies of his friends and fellow officers. It was Nick's nightmare that the missing mammals were pure savages and utterly evil with it.

After the battle of Liktor, the few remaining navy ships had rounded up what survivors they could, along with a few of the more intact enemy craft. It may have been a disastrous day, but now they had the opportunity to examine the bodies and technology of their foes. In war, intelligence was a vital commodity, and they'd just managed to snag some.

The citizens of the IRM were shocked and horrified to be given real proof that their foes were descended from their lost ancestors. None of them wanted to believe it, but facts were facts. Somehow, the rabbits on board that last colony ship had evolved into monsters. Sharp teeth, lethal claws, increased muscle bulk: the cute little herbivores of ancient times had undoubtedly become frighteningly effective predators. Predators that seemed intent on wiping the IRM from the galaxy.

Even more disturbing to the navy was the analysis of their technology and tactics. The technology was far more primitive than their own - to be expected given the long period on board the colony ship during which their development would have stagnated. They made up for it in vast numbers, again, not entirely unexpected now that they knew they were facing rabbits. Of course, given they only had a dozen bodies, many would argue that there might well be other mammals - or even more exotic life-forms - involved. The smarter ones didn't. For every single one of the dozen bodies to be recovered from thousands of enemy craft to all be rabbits by chance stretched the bounds of probability.

And then there was the fact that they were all identical. Every single recovered rabbit corpse shared physical features, from height to fur colour to dark-tipped ears; from eye colour to sex; oh and their DNA was all identical. There was no question: they were fighting an army of clones. It need not even be a perfect soldier - a merely adequate pilot could have been duplicated hundreds of thousands of times. It didn't matter because they had the numbers to overwhelm any force that could be brought to bear.

The thing that disturbed Nick the most however, was their tactics. Not for nothing had it been his plan that led to the destruction of the enemy carrier, which was why the admiralty had brought him in to the analysis teams. They'd only done so after quietly offering him a promotion, which Nick had declined on the grounds that he'd led a lot of good mammals to their deaths. Their tactics though, had been bothering Nick enough that he agreed to the temporary posting. If nothing else, his Takara would need at least a year in a shipyard to be made combat-worth again.

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There was a reason, a very good reason, that this mission would never have been approved by the admiralty. He'd had to try though. Capturing one of their foes alive might have been their only chance to win, to survive. Unfortunately for him, the rabbits' numbers had once again defeated what should have been a sound plan.

They were not just predators, but fantastically aggressive pack hunters. They would lure ships into ambushes: over-eager officers - not all of them inexperienced - pursuing damaged or otherwise weaker forces into gas giant or stellar gravity wells would find themselves swarmed by a force a hundred times larger than they expected. They would pounce on vulnerable targets: damaged ships, far from the most significant threats on the battlefield, would be targeted, knowing the IRM navy would spend precious mammal- and ship-power to defend their vulnerable comrades. They would coordinate attack runs and formations with chilling precision, a true pack working in perfect synchrony to bring down even larger, more deadly prey.

It was this coordinated pack behaviour that bothered Nick, that led him to the conclusion that they needed a live one to study. Their technology might be centuries behind the IRM but the recovered wrecks showed they sure as hell had communication masers, lasers, hell, everything from plain old radio all the way up to a primitive form of quantum field modulation to enable basic FTL communication. The trouble was that the only emissions that navy ships had ever intercepted were very minimal. The kind of thing that might just be an acknowledgement of an order, or a warning about an incoming enemy. There was nothing, not one scrap of data that explained how hundreds of their fighters could coordinate their actions so perfectly.

He'd jumped at the chance to command a ship again when it was offered, the analysis teams winding down with the dearth of new data. Sent out on a simple patrol, it had taken Nick all of a week to notify the two hundred and fifty mammals that crewed the kilometre-long Continental-class that he intended to disobey orders and fly a capture mission deep behind enemy lines. Not one of his crew - not even the political officer - had taken him up on his offer to leave, believing in the mission, believing in _him_.

Now he'd led them to their deaths. Those that weren't killed in the fighting had managed to reach shuttles and escape pods. Many of those had been shot out of space by those damn rabbits. A few had been corralled into parking orbits while larger ships came to claim their prey. Mammals who'd believed in him. That hurt. A lot.

Nick slowly opened his eyes, wincing at the maelstrom of light pouring through the bridge viewports. He briefly recalled stories of ancient religions, the ideas of eternal, fiery torment. A sad smile lifted one side of his mouth. Maybe they weren't so silly after all. _They didn't get their devils right though. Though I guess there's no way anyone would have guessed that adorable little cottontails with big purple eyes would be the real demons._ Clasping his paws at the small of his back, he straightened, forcing his eyes open, ears up and tail out to forty-five degrees down. Pulling himself to attention for the last time, he glanced at the screen to the side of the viewport.

The largest conurbation on the enemy homeworld was less than a thousand kilometres away. Barely a second left. Funny how it was taking so long. How he'd dreamed of finding this world. How ironic that his final act would be to bring devastation to the dream that had cost him so much. A half-billion tons impacting the city at a thousand kilometres per second wouldn't destroy buildings so much as fracture the planet's crust. The explosion would obliterate everything in sight of the city, throw up dust clouds that would wreck the biosphere and cause enough tectonic activity to kill most everything down there.

 _Though here_ I _am bringing fiery retribution to a world full of demons..._

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading. Please let me know what you thought!
> 
> FYI, in case anyone is curious about the numbers, the relativistic gamma factor for 98% of lightspeed is just a little bit bigger than 5. That means that time on board those ships passed at about 1/5th of the speed it did for everyone else. 1300 lightyears would take about 1330 years at 0.98c (though to the mammals on board it would have been 260ly and taken 266 years to get there) so in 2000 years there's plenty of time for the ship to reach Alpha Leporis (it's a real star, in the constellation Lepus) and things to go sideways.
> 
> Oh yeah, and the crash? (500 million tons -> 500 billion kg) / (7859 kg/m^3) = 6.362x10^7 m^3 (63.6 million cubic metres). That sounds like a lot, but if you assume the Takara is a cylinder, a kilometre of length leaves just a 5 metre radius. Of course, the ship isn't a solid cylinder of steel, but as ballpark figures all of this kind of works. You can fudge the percentage of internal space that's not steel, as well as the futuristic materials in play that could have different densities to get a sensible shape out for the warship that fits the stated mass.
> 
> The energy released by the crash, via good old 1/2 * m * v^2, is 2.5x10^33 Joules, the equivalent of annihilating about 2.78 million kg of matter into energy. For most of you I expect that's a meaningless number; here's some context. The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs converted a few kilograms of matter into energy. The sun obliterates 4.26 million tons (4.26 billion kg) of hydrogen each second. The Chicxulub meteor impact that killed off the dinosaurs (amongst 75% of species that existed at the time) released about 5x10^33 Joules (ie about twice what Nick's crashing ship has) and left a 180km diameter crater.
> 
> In this case the similar release of energy would be far more destructive. The damaged ship has accelerated to 1000km/s, far faster than any meteor would ever travel (Earth's escape velocity is 11km/s so any object falling to Earth will reach at most this speed because of conservation of energy - plus a bit of extra because it probably started by falling towards the sun). It's also less of a boulder smacking into the ground as it is a bullet. All that energy will be released in a much smaller area: I'm thinking a crater a dozen or two kilometres across but far deeper - deep enough that the entire area effectively becomes a country-sized supervolcano.
> 
> If you want to know what this kind of impact might look like, take a look at the "Vengenace" trailer for StarCraft 2: Heart of the Swarm at around 1:38 or the opening cinematic to the same game at around 1:55 (both on YouTube). There's a shot of a ship crashing into a city from orbit. Take that and scale it up to an extinction-level event.
> 
> I'll shut up now :)


End file.
